Visual issue with Centrifugal Force in Coriolis stations

wetwire

wetwire
While collecting some research data on station interiors. I was snapping some shots of living spaces for the station interiors.
I came across a visual issue with the angle of windows in the station.
If the centrifugal force felt by a person on the station should pull them outward to the edges of the station. The angle of the windows on the support struts, seem like anyone living in those spaces would be standing on the wall, not the floor of the room.
In the case of the central circle, persons would be walking on the windows.
20200529182245_1.jpg


A closer image of the struts. With the camera rotated so centrifugal force should be pulling people "downward" in the image.
20200529182921_1.jpg

My question: Is this a texture bug, or is there another force at play in coriolis stations I'm not aware of?
My understanding of the Lore indicates that the Elite universe does not have artificial gravity. Only centrifugal force, and magnetic boots.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
1. We're only assuming that they're windows. Perhaps they're actually heat radiators, pumping waste heat from the fusion reactor into the docking bay to help keep the air nice and warm?

2. Being that close to the station's axis, the pseudo-gravity would be very tiny - almost nonexistent.
 

wetwire

wetwire
Maggie_Oz said:
The hab rings at 2klm radius have 1g apparently, in that close to the hub there will barely be anything.
Click to expand...
Sapyx said:
1. We're only assuming that they're windows. Perhaps they're actually heat radiators, pumping waste heat from the fusion reactor into the docking bay to help keep the air nice and warm?

2. Being that close to the station's axis, the pseudo-gravity would be very tiny - almost nonexistent.
Click to expand...

Coriolis Starports have a 2-kilometer diameter. So 1 kilometer radius. Which gives the station 0.5g "Simulated" on the outer hull of the station. 0.25g on the landing pad, and that disc at the back of the station would only have about 0.15g. For reference Earths moon is 0.16g

Many of the windows have shadow images in them that appear to look like plants, and desk. Giving a good indication which direction the floor is.
 

wetwire

wetwire
Drelthar said:
It looks cooler that way.
Click to expand...

No doubt they look cool. I'm just suggesting the windows should be rotated 90 degrees.
Now that I've noticed the windows, I can't un-see them every time i land in a station.
It's like suddenly noticing some of the text in your cockpit is backwards because its a copy/paste of the other side.
Does it change the enjoyment of the game? not really.
Is it distracting because you know it's there? For me it is.

The Cobra starts drifting to the left while entering the Coriolis station, coming dangerously close to colliding with the the metal grate around the mail slot.
"Hey.. Commander. um.. we are getting pretty close to swapping paint with the station."
The command snaps it attention away from the backwards written text on the bulkhead, and quickly corrects the Cobra's trajectory.
"Sorry about that."
 

Maggie_Oz

Maggie_Oz
There would be no issue with them walking on what you perceive is the wall.
There is almost no acceleration outwards at that point and little to none in the middle.
 

Maolagin

M
Well I too have spent some time looking at those textures in various places. I think it's fun to imagine how the station interiors might work, and to a certain point the art does give some clues about that. What I would point out is that the "window" texture you're highlighting naturally resolves into office windows to our eyes, because of the similarly to partially lit office building floors. But there are several clues that that's not what they are.

They're too small, for one thing, and of a bizarre variety of shapes. Unlike plenty of other actual windowed spaces in the model, they are opaque. Here and elsewhere, their orientation doesn't bear any particular correspondence to the gravity vector, being almost always painted in alignment with the long axis of the structure they appear on. Appearing brightly lit from inside as they do, they would also be useless for looking out into dimly lit spaces - or black space for that matter. They certainly aren't for admiring the view, as they often face blank metal bulkheads or other instances of the "window texture".

Someone suggested that they're thermal radiators. But again, they only occasionally face the cold black of space, and there's gentler ways to warm the docking bay air supply than running a toaster oven inside. Between ship and surface base models we have a variety of shapes of actual radiators, and none of them look much like these. Radiators are modelled with some level of scientific accuracy in fact, and are only this bright yellow color when dumping extreme amounts of heat.

No, my guess is that, like a great many things in game, from pilot ranks to the ubiquitous billboards, they are symbolic. Sometime in the preceding thousand years of living in space, this "windows texture" has become the universally recognized signifier for "there are humans inside this structure". So that, even though stations in the 3300s are nigh-invulnerable, you feel appropriately bad about shooting at them, and understand why doing so is met with deadly force.
 

wetwire

wetwire
They sure look like living spaces to me.
Pretty sure this image is depicting a pair of plants and a chair as shadowed projections onto the glass.


20200701084928_1.jpg

zoom out, the image above is in the top left of the next screenshot. (this is the side profile of one of the struts from the first image in the post)
The camera is tilted to be "level" with the suspected "floor" depicted in the window.
Anyone in that section of the station should be feeling about 0.15g force pulling from the right side of the image.

20200701084918_1.jpg

I do agree with @Maolagin These textures are purely symbolic, background texture used to indicate habitable space. The windows near landing pads are more clearly defined with space behind them. I'm not really arguing about what the textures are suppose to represent. I'm pointing out they are applied incorrect in relation to the suggested centrifugal force of a rotating station. The ones in the images I've posted thus far need turned 90 degrees counter clockwise.
This is not even touching the window texture on the center disc at the back of stations. all those windows need to face the mail slot, if they are to represent space in a station that obeys the simulated gravity.

These same textures are used in carriers to imply living spaces. Carriers do not have artificial gravity, but its fair to assume all the projected shadows of tables, chairs, and plants are simply secured to the deck. Giving a room a sense of up and down in zero-g is comfortable but not necessary. But when you have forces acting against a person, such as Coriolis stations, securing your desk, chair and plants to the wall, and not in harmony with the force that is pulling you, seems a bit odd.
 

Darth Ender

D
away from the outside edge where centifugal force is dominant, the structure you're standing in is still moving and rotating, So while you wont feel much centrifugal force ("gravity" you'll have the structure's walls pushing you in a new direction all the time (you wont be free floating so much as resisting falling "down" a hallway constantly)... In fact, straight hallways that lead from the center to the outter walls would probably be really dangerous without frequent bulkhead doors blocking the direction you're constantly being pushed in.

I'd imagine you'd want an angled hallway from the center to the outter edge so that the force of you being pushed in a circle is met with an ever icreasing angle in front of you so that by the time you reach the outter edge you are exiting in parallel with the circumference and the whole adjustment to where you're feeling the "push" of force was done gradually the entire way. So gradually spiralling arms from the counter to the outside would be preferrable for someone walking from the core to the 1g circumference areas.

Utopia patents the progressive spiralling corridors in all future spinning stations and demands that this design be implemented in all future and current Utopian systems.
 

Bottom Hat

Bottom Hat
In your first picture, the one on the right is a Muppet. I think he was called Beaky or something like that.

Anyway, my point being that Muppets aren't subject to the effects of centrifugal gravity, or that's what Jim Henson said in an interview once.

I do like your research though, it's very interesting and thought provoking, so please don't think I'm totally taking the pee...!
 

wetwire

wetwire
A visual of the centrifugal force inside a Coriolis station expressed in earth gravity (1.0g).
Coriolis Gravity.jpg


@Darth Ender : Yes the hallways reaching from the center outward should be curved, But alas the problems of trying to put a city inside a spinning station.
Somewhere on the station they at least could have some nifty looking water fountains due to the effects you are describing.
f5_6-e1488837272777.gif
 

Boff'in

Boff'in
In the early years after launch, David Braben talked about Gravity (artificial gravity) is a luxury, and you have to pay a premium price for it.

it will be interesting to see how much of that sticks
 

Drelthar

Drelthar
Boff'in said:
In the early years after launch, David Braben talked about Gravity (artificial gravity) is a luxury, and you have to pay a premium price for it.

it will be interesting to see how much of that sticks
Click to expand...

By artificial gravity, you mean spinning stuff around right?

Not a magic gravity generator? Pretty sure the lore's always been those don't exist in the elite universe.
 

Kaocraft

Kaocraft
wetwire said:
While collecting some research data on station interiors. I was snapping some shots of living spaces for the station interiors.
I came across a visual issue with the angle of windows in the station.
If the centrifugal force felt by a person on the station should pull them outward to the edges of the station. The angle of the windows on the support struts, seem like anyone living in those spaces would be standing on the wall, not the floor of the room.
In the case of the central circle, persons would be walking on the windows.
View attachment 179127


A closer image of the struts. With the camera rotated so centrifugal force should be pulling people "downward" in the image.
View attachment 179128

My question: Is this a texture bug, or is there another force at play in coriolis stations I'm not aware of?
My understanding of the Lore indicates that the Elite universe does not have artificial gravity. Only centrifugal force, and magnetic boots.
Click to expand...
The game wasn't built to stand up to this level of scrutiny. That's all this is. It's possible that with Odyssey (and the switch to a FPS level of presentation), that there will be some graphical tweaks to improve the sense of internal self-consistency, but I doubt it because the overall trend since release has been to pay less and less heed to the world building aspects of the game. I mean, your observations about window placement are the kind of thing Frontier would have noticed and fixed a long long time ago if it were the sort of thing they care about. In the meantime, they've given us stuff like this:

maxresdefault.jpg


Which pretty much tells me that none of the people NOW working on Elite have any clue about the underlying 'Sci' in this sci-fi game, and they're definitely not interested in building anything into the game going forward which takes notions like variable gravity into account. (exhibit "B" is the coffee machine on the Krait, btw).
 
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